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Thought and Its Objects Author(s): Akeel Bilgrami Source: Philosophical Issues, Vol. 1, Consciousness (1991), pp. 215-232 Published by: Ridgeview Publishing Company Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1522930 Accessed: 21/09/2008 23:03
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PHILOSOPHICALISSUES, 1

10 UConsciousness,

1991

Thought

and its Objects

Akeel Bilgrami
To the question of the title of his paper -what is present to the mind?- Donald Davidson's answer is: nothing. He argues that if the phrase 'objects of thought' is intended to suggest that thinkers stand in a psychological or epistemological relation with such objects, then we must deny that the phrase picks out anything at all. What is his reason for rejecting such objects? It is simply this. By definition, these objects of thought, these 'epistemological intermediaries', as he calls them, are such that thinkers cannot be wrong about what they are. But, he says, there is nothing like that, nothing about which we cannot on occasion be wrong. He, then, asks two questions. First, he wonders, since many philosophers think that selfknowledge or first person authority is ensured only if there are objects of thought, does it follow from denying objects of thoughts that we do not know what we think? He argues that it does not. There is no threat that the denial brings to self-knowledge. He goes on to give a positive account of why we can have self-knowledge despite denying objects of thought. The positive account shows how there could be no interpretation of agents at all if we did not assume that

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agents had self-knowledge or first person authority. The very idea of interpretation necessitates self-knowledge. Second, he wonders, since many philosophers have thought that the relational nature of the predicate forces us to posit objects of thoughts, does denying objects of thought amount to giving up on the idea that 'believes' is a relational predicate? He canvasses various criticisms philosophers have offered of the idea that it is a relational predicate, and then reminds us of compelling arguments which he himself has given against such criticisms many years ago. He concludes that one ought not to deny that it is a relational predicate. He then offers his own positive account of how to reconcile the relational nature of 'believes' with the denial of objects of thought. 'Believes' relates the thinker to an object, about which we need never say that it is "within the ken of the believer". He or she need not stand in any psychological relation with it. It is not that sort of object. What sort of object is it, then? He answers this question by saying that it is none other than an utterance of our's (the interpreters') which we take to have the same truth-conditions as the belief whose content is being identified. This involves no commitment to saying that it is something with which the thinker stands in a psychological or epistemological relation. I find myself in general agreement with Davidson on both questions. But Davidson uses his answers to draw certain philosophical consequences and to make certain polemical points against recent philosophical work on intentionality. He thinks his answer to the first question shows that philosophers like Putnam are quite wrong to think that the doctrine of externalism about intentional content threatens selfknowledge. He thinks his answer to the second question shows that philosophers like Searle and Fodor are quite wrong to think that indeterminacy and holism threaten the reality of intentional states. Here I find myself unconvinced that Davidson has fully and adequately addressed the worries that these philosophers are concerned with. Not that I think that the worries are unanswerable. It is Davidson's response to them that I have qualms about. I will spend the rest of this comment discussing these two consequences that Davidson draws from his denial of objects of thought. I will first

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look at the consequenceshe draws from his answer to the he questionof self-knowledge,and then to the consequences draws from his answerto the question about the relational nature of the predicate'believes'

1 Self-Knowledge and Objects of Thought

The denial of objects of thought is intendedby Davidsonto have a devastating effect at once on conflictingphilosophical conceptionsof the relation between self-knowledgeand intentionalcontent. On the one hand, there is a conceptionheld by certaininternalistphilosophers who believethat only if there are these internal objects of thought can we guaranteethat we have self-knowledge.Descartes,and some of the empiricistswere such philosophers.On the other hand, there is a conception held by certainexternalistphilosophers who deny that there are these inner objects of thought and who, as a result, are He cites Putnam amongthese. happyto deny self-knowledge. He argues that they are both wrong and they are wrong for the same reason. They both share an assumptionthat brings them to their wrong conclusions. The assumptionis that only objects of thought will guaranteeself-knowledge. Let me elaborateon this and then commenton it. Davidson poses the followingquestion: how can externalism, the doctrine that our intentional contents are constituted by items in the external environment,allow for selfknowledge?And this is his answer:
The suggestionI am proposingabout the natureof the propositional attitudes appliesdirectlyto a problemthat has troubled a numberof philosophers in recentyears. There are conto show that the correctdetermination of vincing arguments the contentsof beliefs(and meaningsand otherpropositional attitudes) dependsin part on causalconnectionsbetweenthe believerand events and objects in the worldof whichhe may be ignorant. A standard example is Putnam's twin-earth case. We are invited to imagine,I'm sure you will remember, that there is a twin to our Earth whichis, in all immediately

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discernable respects, identical with our earth. On it is my doppelganger, molecule for molecule the same, having been exposed to the same conditioning, and having exactly the same linguistic dispositions. Yet one of us believes it is water he sees before him (me) when the other believes it is twater. The explanation is that there where there is water on Earth there is twater on Twearth, though no one has yet detected the difference. Since there is no inner or psychological difference between me and my twin, neither of us has any reason to say he believes on thing rather than the other. Therefore neither of us knows what he believes. So there may be, and perhaps always are, non-subjective factors, factors unknown to the thinker, which decide what the "object of thought" is. If the identity of the "object of thought" is partly dependent on factors of which the person is ignorant, doesn't it follow that the person doesn't know what he thinks? The answer is that it doesn't follow. It would follow if the object used to identify my thought were something I had to be able to discriminate in order to know what I think. But this is what we have abandoned.1 Davidson, as I said, has argued that internalist philosophers have assumed that thoughts take objects which are inner epistemological intermediaries, and they have assumed this in order to account for the special fact of first-person knowledge of thoughts. In the hands of the internalists he thinks the assumption amounts to what he calls a 'myth of the subjective'. For reason that I mentioned at the very beginning, he thinks that we should not assume that thoughts take any objects. He claims that once we give up on the objects of thought thesis, we can then see that there is no threat that externalism poses to first person authority, since it is only the obsession with that thesis which would have conjured up the threat in the first place. As I said, it does seem to me that that the denial of objects of thought is a very important part of the proper understanding of the contents of the propositional attitudes. Attributors 1Donald Davidson, "Whatis Present to the Mind", in this volume, p. 214.

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of thought use their own sentences to state what the contents of an agent's propositional attitudes are, and this need not and should not imply that anything is the object of the agent's attitudes.2 And I think the criticism of internalism in the first suggestion is quite telling against many internalists, especially Descartes, but also the empiricists, who did take thoughts to have inner objects given to consciousness. Even so, I worry about the following. In itself, the denial of objects of thoughts does not tell us why there is not a problem for self-knowledge if one thinks the world external to us determine our thoughts in the specific way suggested by Putnam.3 It does not seem to even so much as address that issue. I think Davidson's diagnosis of what is wrong with Putnam's acquiescence in the rejection of self-knowledge is unsatisfyingly general and does not pay enough attention to the way in which the acquiescence flows from Putnam's specific externalism. It is Putnam's (and Kripke's and Burge's somewhat different) specific externalism which poses a threat to self-knowledge rather than an assumption on Putnam's part that only objects of thought will ensure that we (by and large) have self-knowledge. To repeat, Davidson says that internalists assume that our intentional states have objects in the sense of epistemological intermediaries which we cannot be wrong about. This is how internalists explain first person authority. He strongly disagrees with them that this is how to give an explanation or account of first person authority. I myself have no quarrel with this criticism of internalism. He then argues that externalists such as Hilary Putnam go straight from the denial of such internalism to the conclusion that we often do not know what we believe, that we lack first person authority.4 Davidson finds this equally unacceptable and charges such
2Not epistemological intermediaries in consciousness nor even anything sentence-like, as is sometimes claimed today. 3In this paper Davidson discusses only Putnam's externalism, but in (Davidson 1987) he raises the same question -is externalism compatible with self-knolwedge?- and gives the same answer with a quite different externalism in mind, Burge's social externalism. 4Burge, unlike Putnam, does not accept this conclusion that we may lack self-knowledge. Putnam accepts the conclusion because he thinks

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externalists with wrongly accepting and sharing an aspect of internalist faith, which is that first person authority can only be explained by the positing of epistemological intermediaries that serve as the objects of thought, and which we cannot be wrong about. That is, he says that they swing to their conclusion about lack of self-knowledge because they share the assumption with internalists that self-knowledge requires the thesis about inner objects of thought which are directly perceived. Giving up on the thesis, i.e., giving up on inner objects of thoughts, they give up on self-knowledge.5 Let's look a little harder at the criticism of Putnam. The trouble with the criticism is that it takes Putnam to be saying that a mere denial of internalism is sufficient to give up on first person authority. It is only if we take Putnam this way, and then take internalists to be committed to the objects of thought thesis, that lay Putnam open to Davidson's criticism that he shares an assumption with the internalist. But it does not seem to me that Putnam's idea that we may not always know what we believe turns on just simply denying the internalist position with its commitment to internal objects of thought. Rather it turns on the specific externalist commitments which flow from his (and Kripke's and Burge's) views on reference and meaning.6 I think there is enough textual evidence in Putnam's "Meaning of Meaning" (where his
that there is another notion of content, narrow content, which raises no problem for self-knowledge since it is purely internal. Burge denies that there is any need for a second notion of internal content and argues that his externalism does not imply a denial of self-knowledge. In (Bilgrami 1991) and much more briefly in (Bilgrami 1987) I argue that Burge must adopt a second notion of content, given his specific form of externalism. 50r at any rate, as I said in the last footnote, they retain selfknowledge by bifurcating content, i.e., by manufacturing a second notion of purely internalist content. And Davidson will presumably want to say that this second notion falls once again within the thesis that there are epistemologically intermediary objects of thought. 6This is a common conflation in the few discussions of this subject that exist. See, for instance, Crispin Wright in (Wright 1989a, p. 630) -especially his long footnote 6)- for a move from the specific externalisms of Putnam and Burge to remarks about why externalism need not threaten self-knowledge, remarks which talk much more generally about externalism rather than about these specific externalist views. A genuine defence of their externalisms against the charge that they

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externalism is first discussed) to establish that this is what he took his denial of first person authority, over many of our beliefs, to turn on. But even apart from textual evidence of his intentions, the point is easy to demonstrate. Putnam is committed to an externalism that comes from a certain scientific essentialist view of natural kind terms and concepts. And it is this that gives rise to the problem for self-knowledge. If many of my concepts -say, the concept of water- are fixed by the objective natures of kinds in the environment, then my intentional contents which are composed of these concepts -say, the belief that water will quench thirst- will not be something that I will have (full) self-knowledge of, if I have no knowledge or only partial knowledge of their objective natures; that is, if I have not the appropriate knowledge of chemistry in this case, and the chemical facts about water at least partly determine my concept of water, then I will at best have only partial knowledge of the contents which contain my concept of water. If Putnam were to join Davidson in denying objects of thoughts, could he avoid this consequence of his externalist view? I don't see how he can. Here is a way of showing why he cannot. Suppose a chemical ignoramus on Earth believes that water is not H20. It would seem that if we take Putnam's externalist view this person believes in something inconsistent. But that is an absurd conclusion to come to. A chemically ignorant person is chemically ignorant not logically deficient. It would be absurdly uncharitable to attribute something that makes him come out to be a logical idiot. How can Putnam, then, get out of this absurd conclusion that seems to follow from his externalism? Only, I suggest, by saying that this person does not know (or does not know fully) what he believes.7 If he does not know what he believes then attributing an inconsistent belief is not absurdly
threaten self- knowledge must take up their externalisms in detail and must respond to them. 7In (Bilgrami 1991, ch.2), I canvass various things Putnam, Burge and other externalists of a certain kind might say to get out of this dilemma of attributing either inconsistent beliefs or beliefs not known to the agent himself. And I reject them all. I think they are stuck

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uncharitable. But this has landed Putnam with just the rejection of self-knowledge which we said he cannot avoid. No amount of denying that there are objects of thought is going to help Putnam avoid this conclusion. I think that Putnam's intent can also be established by pointing out that these externalist commitments better explain why it is that, for Putnam, first person authority fails to hold only in some cases only (cases, where an agent does not know the right chemistry or some other of nature's essences.). Whereas if one gave Davidson's explanation for why Putnam gives up on self-knowledge, then self-knowledge would fail to hold much more comprehensively than Putnam seems to want to say; more comprehensively, because if one believed that self-knowledge of thoughts was a result of thoughts having inner objects and one also thought that there are no inner objects of thought, then presumably one would not restrict one's denial of self-knowledge to the sorts of cases (natural kinds) Putnam discusses.8 It is because Davidson thinks that Putnam's surrender of first person authority is due to his sharing an underlying assumption with the internalism he rejects (rather than because of his specific externalist commitments), that he thinks it is sufficient to criticize Putnam's externalism for sharing the objects of thoughts thesis with internalism. But it is not sufficient. The correct and complete diagnosis of Putnam's abandonment of self-knowledge for externally constituted contents is that his specific externalism sometimes does not allow for self-knowledge, when it should. The proof of this point is that one can formulate a specific alternative externalist view of content that does not threaten self-knowledge
with this dilemma and they must be impaled on one of the horns or they must posit another notion of content that is not externalist in their sense in order to avoid being impaled. I cannot possibly reproduce that discussion here. Putnam casts his externalist net a little wider than I am indicating here. It is more than natural kind terms that will raise a problem for self-knowledge. If one takes Kripke's externalism about proper names that too will raise a similar problem. Burge casts the net even wider by bringing in a social externalism over and above a scientific essentialist one.

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in this way. One can, for instance, claim that the external world constitutes concepts but not have any truck with the scientificessentialismor rigid designationthat is essentialto Putnam'sview of certainterms and conceptsthat go into the specificationof concepts. Spellingout the details of this externalismis an importantand complextask, which I cannot possiblytake on here. I havetried to do so in (Bilgrami1987) and more elaboratelyin (Bilgrami1991). My point for now is that there are externalismswhichthreatenself-knowledge and there are externalismswhichdo not. Davidson'sdiagnosis for why an externalist need not abandonself-knowledge does not distinguish between these externalismsand is, as a result, an unsatisfyinglygeneral diagnosis. Putnam's externalism threatens self-knowledgeeven if Putnam were to grant to Davidsonthat objects of thoughts are not the only way to guaranteeself-knowledge.Once you adopt Putnam's externalismnothing will guaranteeself-knowledge.It is his particularexternalismthat gives rise to the problem. Any complete diagnosismust show how it threatens it and propose an externalismthat does not. This unsatisfyingly generaldiagnosisin Davidsonfeedsinto the similarlyunsatisfyingpositive suggestionhe goes on to make about how to make externalismcompatiblewith selfknowledge,once we give up on objects of thoughts. His answer at the end of the paper is that there can be no denying the presumptionof first person authorityor self-knowledge because without it agents could not be said to be "interpretable at all". In an earlier paper, (Davidson 1987), he makesthe same point more explicitly: When we have freed ourselves from the assumption that must have we can see how the mysterious thoughts objects, fact that mentalstates as we commonly conceive them are identified in part by theirnaturalhistorynot only fails to touch the internalcharacter of such states or to threaten firstpersonauthority; it alsoopensthe wayto an explanation of firstpersonauthority.The explanation comeswith the realization that what a person'swordsmean depends in the most basiccaseson the kindsof objectsand events that havecausedthe personto holdthe wordsto be appli-

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cable; similarly for what the person's thoughts are about. An interpreter of another's words and thoughts must depend on scattered information, fortunate training, and imaginative surmise in coming to understand the other. The agent herself, however, is not in a position to wonder whether she is generally using her own words to apply to the right objects and events, since whatever she regularly applies them to gives her words the meaning they have and her thoughts the contents they have. Of course, in any particular case, she may be wrong about what she believes about the world; what is impossible is that she is would be wrong most of the time. The reason is apparent: unless there is a presumption that the speaker knows what she means, i.e., getting her own language right, there would be nothing for an interpreter to interpret. To put the matter another way, nothing could count as someone regularly misapplying her own words. First person authority, the social character of language, and the external determinants of thought and meaning go naturally together, once we give up the myth of the subjective, the idea that thoughts require mental objects. This positive suggestion is intended to show that there is no incompatibility between externalism and self-knowledge. But I think it is arguable that it does not do that and the only reason Davidson thinks it does is that he has conceived of the incompatibility in unsatisfyingly general terms, he has conceived of it as flowing from a misguided commitment to objects of thought. This way of conceiving of the incompatibility ushers out the relevance of specific versions of externalism, it ushers out the relevance of specific versions of externalism which do indeed make externalism incompatible with self-knowledge. It therefore allows Davidson to go away with the impression that his positive remarks get rid of the incompatibility. Instead all that the positive remarks do is answer a very different question, they answer a question that has nothing specifically to do with externalism: what, in general, explains the undeniable fact that agents whom we are interpreting have self-knowledge of their own thoughts, given that in our interpretations we are not specifying objects of

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ken? And it answersit thought within their epistemological to the of the by appealing necessity interpreter's assumingor that whom are they granting agents, interpreting,have such Now aside for a moment whether self-knowledge. putting this answersthe question adequately,the relevantpoint for now should be that the question itself, though it does focus on the interpreteror the third person rather than the agent himself, is neverthelessquite differentfrom the initial question we were interested in (and that Davidson himself has posed in this passage): how is self-knowledgecompatible with externalism? I think that Davidson is under the impressionthat because his explanation is given from the point of view of what the third person or interpretermust about the first personor interpretee'sauthority acknowledge over his own states, it is an explanationwhich does answer the initial question. But externalismis a muchmore specific doctrinethan one whichsays that contentsare constitutedby the deliverancesof a third person or interpreter.The externalism, in the questionwe are interestedin, claims that the interpretermakesessentialappealto items in the agent'sexternal (social or non-social) environment as constitutinghis contents. Davidson'spositive explanationof self-knowledge makes no mention of this appeal at all. I wouldsuggest that howeverself-knowledge of intentional contents is explainedgenerally,an explanationof how selfknowledgeof contents is retained, despite the appeal to external items in the determinationof content, must turn on coming up with specific and detailed positive proposalsfor an externalism that does not threaten self-knowledge. It must come up with a preciselyspecifiedexternalismthat is a genuinealternativeto the Putnam-style externalismwhich Davidsonis discussingand trying to make compatiblewith self-knowledge. I do not believe, for the reasons I gave, that Putnam's externalism can be made compatible with self-knowledge. I would agree with Putnam that if we endorsedhis externalismthere is no way that externalist contents would not threaten self-knowledge. One cannot make it compatibleby giving a general account of what accounts for self-knowledgein the way that Davidsonsuggests. The questionbefore Davidsonis what makesself-knowledge pos-

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sible, given externalism. His positive account which invokes the need to posit self-knowledge to find agents interpretable at all does not address this question. The claim that interpretation requires self-knowledge on the part of the interpretee is unhelpful with the problem that arises for self-knowledge when interpretation and content-attribution proceeds along Putnam's (or Burge's lines) i.e, proceeds by looking to scientific essences (or to experts' opinion) in the attribution of concepts to the interpretee. Just pointing out that the very idea of interpretation requires self-knowledge on the part of the interpretee, therefore, says something unsatisfyingly general about the problem we are struggling with: how to make externalism compatible with self-knowledge?

Indeterminacy, Holism and Objects of Thought

Let me now turn to Davidson's discussion of what he takes to be another consequence of his denial of objects of thoughts. Here the target of his criticism is not Putnam, but Searle and Fodor. He thinks that they too have missed the point that there are no objects of thoughts, and have therefore unnecessarily raised worries about certain sensible views of intentional content. Here again I think Davidson has misunderstood the source of Searle's and Fodor's worries. I do no think their worries stem from a hidden commitment to objects of thought. Let me elaborate. Having denied that taking 'believes' as a relational predicate requires that there be objects of thought within the epistemological or psychological ken of thinkers, Davidson suggests that the relational nature of the predicate is best understood in terms of an interpreter's assigning his own sentences to specify the contents of a thinker's thoughts. He spells this out with the analogy of assigning numbers in the measurement of temperature. And having done so, he takes up Searle's and Fodor's worries that this will introduce a holism and an indeterminacy in the study of intentional con-

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tent which will, in turn, destroy the possibility of taking a realist attitude towards intentionality. He argues that once we give up on objects of thought, then neither indeterminacy nor holism is a threat to their status as real things. His argument could be summarized as follows. Taking a realist attitude towards a class of sentences is to take them as being capable of truth and falsity. Attributions of thought and meaning could be taken to be true or false, despite indeterminacy; only now there is no temptation to think that a statement of the conditions of their truth or falsity specify objects of the mind. Indeterminacy is inevitable since there are no such objects which would bestow determinacy. But the analogy with numbers and temperature which he offers, and the consequent analogy of indeterminacy with metres and feet, Fahrenheit and Centigrade, shows that there is no serious threat that indeterminacy brings with it. After all, saying "Its 32? Fahrenheit" does not mean one is not saying something true or false, just because one could also have said "Its 0? Centigrade". However, I would have thought that Searle's objection is not that objects of thought exist and so I know from my gaze on an object present to my mind, which of two meanings that two translation (or truth) manuals have attributed to me is the right one.9 I would think that Searle's point is the more sophisticated one that if one takes Davidson's and Quine's third person approach to these things, one is saddled (in the attribution of meanings and thoughts) with the interests of the interpreter. And, I would have thought that he argues that these interests of the interpreter have the effect of producing indeterminacies in the attributions which will not be of the trivial and harmless kind of indeterminacy that
9In fact there is a question about whether Searle is even committed to the 'objects of thought' thesis. In (Searle 1983) he explicitly announces a Fregean conception of sense and thought but explicitly denies that he is committed to Frege's view of senses grasped by agents. Perhaps Davidson has in mind to argue that anybody who embraces the kind of Cartesian internalism about the mind in the way that Searle does must, despite this explicit denial, embrace objects of thought. But the argument for that is not itself explicit in Davidson's paper.

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Davidson's analogy with Fahrenheit and Centigrade scales for the measurement of temperature suggest. It is true that Searle sometimes speaks as if even examples of trivial indeterminacy are threatening in some way to the reality of intentional states. But here I think he does so, not because he is insisting on an 'object of thought' conception of intentionality, but because he is not following through on his own argument from the point about interests of the third person to see that the point only applies if there are non-trivial examples of indeterminacy. Thus the issue between Searle and Davidson lies in the question whether the the third person approaches can impose enough constraints of the right sort, such that the interest-relativity inherent in these approaches is kept enough in check so as to ensure that the indeterminacies are trivial and harmless. Davidson has argued elsewhere that his principle of charity will keep things under such check but, unfortunately Searle has never joined him in any dispute about the relevance of this to indeterminacy.1l But that is where the deep issue lies and that is an area quite distinct from the question of objects of thought, since the issue can arise even after denying that there are such objects. The case of Fodor seems to me even more complicated and distant from the thesis about objects of thought. Fodor's objections to holism and how it threatens the reality of thought and meaning has not much to do with indeterminacy. His worry is that if the content of a thought is the content it is because it has inferential relations with other thoughts, then there will be no saying that one person has the same thought as another since their surrounding beliefs are bound to be somewhat different. What is worse, for almost exactly the same reason, there will be no saying that someone's thought is the same from one waking moment to the next. This will
10In (Bilgrami 1989) I argue that Davidson's early formulations of the principle of charity will not keep things enough under check and it is probably what Searle has at the back of his mind when he criticizes radical interpretation for being too caught up with the third person point of view. I argue further that subsequent formulations by him and others like Grandy are more likely to keep things in check and I explicitly connect this point with the entire question of realism about intentional states. See also (Bilgrami 1991, ch. 5.)

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make generalizations about beliefs and desires impossible and there will be no sense in which such states will explain behaviour. If intentional states are not pulling their weight in explanations, that will, in turn, put into doubt the status of intentional states as real things. It will undermine any realist attitude toward intentional states. Now this worry does not seem to me to be one that the analogy with numbers and the measurement of temperature will help to allay. For even within the triviality and harmlessness of a holistically induced indeterminacy, the holism that Fodor worries about will survive; it will survive because meanings and contents, as Davidson has always insisted, will always get their specification and individuation in the holistic context of an indefinite number of other meanings and contents. That holism is a fact about meaning that persists even if the indeterminacy it induces is harmless. And it is a fact that Fodor finds far from harmless. And what he finds harmful in it would not be erased if he joined Davidson in denying objects of thought. What is neurotic about Fodor's worry flows from a quite different source than a commitment to objects of thought. It flows from a deeply mistaken view, I believe, of the relationship between a theory of meaning which (I agree with Davidson) is necessarily holistic and the contents which go into the explanation of behaviour. A theory of meaning specifies the meanings of the terms of an agents language, or one might say, it fixes his concepts. I think of these specifications (even if they were given in the clauses of a truth-theory) as summarizing the beliefs a person has associated with each term. Since no two persons are likely to have the same beliefs associated with a term, no two persons, at the level of a theory of meaning, are likely to share concepts. But when we attribute contents to beliefs and desires of agents to explain actions, these contents are not composed of those unshared concepts. Rather the particular local context in which a particular action is being explained will allow us to distil out of the aggregate of beliefs associated with the concept (at the non-local, meaning-theoretic level) just what is required for that locality. So, imagine two agents. One knows chemistry the other doesn't. Hence their concepts of water at the

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meaning-theoretic level are quite different since their respective aggregates of beliefs associated with 'water' will not overlap. Yet if in a particular explanatory locality we are explaining their common action of drinking tumblers full of a certain substance to quench their thirst, we may distil out of their differing aggregate sets of beliefs those that are necessary for the contents that go into that explanation. These may well coincide; for the chemical beliefs that the chemically knowledgeable one of them associates with water can be left out of the explanation of that action of his. It is irrelevant to it. Fodor's mistake is to think that the relationship between a theory of meaning on the one hand and particular contents on the other is such that the concepts fixed by the former go exactly and directly into the latter, i.e, the concepts fixed by a theory of meaning go exactly and directly into the contents which explain behaviour.ll If they did go directly into it then what he finds harmful about holism will indeed be harmful to intentional content. But it is a mistake to think that they go into it directly. And the point I want to make against Davidson is that I don't see that this mistake, if it is a mistake, is related in any obvious way to any commitment to objects of thought. I have argued that Davidson is right to deny that there are objects of thought in the epistemological sense, and right to insist that neither self-knowledge nor the relational nature of 'believes' is under threat, if there are no such objects of thought. I have, however, expressed reservations against the consequences he has drawn from these insights for his criticisms against certain contemporary views of intentionality due to Putnam and Searle and Fodor. If these philosophers are wrong to hold the views they respectively hold about self-knowledge and indeterminacy and holism regarding intentional states, it is not for reasons having to do with objects of thoughts.
liThis is a very widespread mistake in the study of meaning and content, and it has partly to do with unclarity about what one should mean by the idea that truth-theories give meanings and truth-conditions individuate content. For a more detailed discussion of these themes and an account of content which is not based on this mistaken conception, see (Bilgrami 1991, ch.l and ch.4.)

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